4 – Strange New World

Grade: C+

Summary

The Enterprise comes upon an M-class planet, very much like Earth. Because he receives no response from hails to the planet, Captain Archer decides to create a landing party and explore. At first, everything seems normal and peaceful, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Once the sun goes down and the winds kick up, everyone on the planet starts seeing crazy things.

Commentary

If you’re new to Star Trek, then you might be surprised by this episode. Every time that an episode starts out on a beautiful planet that everyone loves and the sun is shining and all is peaceful, it doesn’t take long before everything falls apart. If you’re reading my website, then you most likely have seen a Star Trek episode or two, so you know things can never be like the way they’re shown at the first of the episode.

Risa, for example, always has some crazy stuff in it. Picard gets mixed up in some silly caper involving Vash and some Ferengi. Riker gets addicted to some game that ends up brainwashing the crew. In the Original Series, Kirk, McCoy, and others take shore leave on a planet where everything is wonderful until people start thinking of their worst fears and suddenly McCoy gets stabbed by a black knight. So yeah, we’ve seen crazy stuff happen before on peaceful planets. And it should come as no surprise that Strange New World is just the same thing as we’ve seen in Star Trek dozens of times before.

On the other hand, this one is a little better because the actual problem is rather original. In this case, it’s pollen that has a hallucinating effect on the crew. So that’s interesting.

Of Note

Kellie Waymire plays Crewman Cutler in this episode. She was also in the Voyager episode called The Muse. She most likely would have appeared in many more episodes in this series, but she passed away only two years after this episode aired.

The scanner that T’Pol uses looks a lot like the ones used in the Next Generation. I wonder why they didn’t use one that resembled one like Spock’s.